Vladimir Lenin. Photo: NewsClick/File photo.
By Prabir Purkayastha – Oct 24, 2024
On his death centenary this year, we need to not only remember Lenin’s contributions to political action and building a revolutionary party, but also to the philosophy of science and the role of electricity.
This year is Comrade V I Lenin’s death centenary year. For those who are socialists and communists, the Soviet Union was the hope of founding a new society in which the working people, and not the capitalist or the feudal classes, would own the means of production. For many, the Soviet Union gave hope for a different social order and the possibility of national liberation from the clutches of the colonial rulers. The Bolshevik Revolution changed the capitalist and the colonial world, giving birth to the possibility of a world without greed and oppression, where those laboured would get the fruits of their labour. Not a set of parasitic classes who had very little contribution to production.
But this is not what I want to write today. I will address two very different aspects of Lenin’s contribution which may not be so well-known: i) the electricity sector and its larger role in society, ii) science and philosophy. I will address only a few of the issues he grappled with and how these issues continue today, though in different forms.
In both these fields, Lenin not only had views but was also an active participant in shaping the views of his generation. In the electricity sector, he saw the future of industrialisation and agriculture in the Soviet Union. So much so that he declared that the Soviets and electrification equalled socialism; this was not simply a slogan but a deeply thought-out structure of the relationship he was proposing between the economy, the productive forces and knowledge. That, for him, included both science and technology—and the peoples’ organisations: at that time, the Soviets.
The second addresses the new physics—relativity and quantum mechanics—both of which created problems not only for classical physics but also all the existing philosophical systems. Not surprisingly, not only were the old-school philosophers divided, but also the Marxists, many of whom dismissed both relativity and quantum mechanics as bourgeois deviations.
For Lenin, it was not simply a question of interpretation of reality within the framework of dialectical materialism but also one of how to enlarge the framework itself to meet these new challenges. Though he had published his initial work, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, and is widely known, his Philosophical Notebook, which advanced his formulations over his earlier work, remains as notes.
Though published later in the Soviet Union and available to all interested people, we miss the final form his notes would surely have taken due to his early death in 1924 at the age of 53.
Let us start with the story of the Soviet Union’s electrification. At the time the Bolshevik Revolution took place—in 1918—the Soviet Union had an installed capacity of only 4.8 MW, catering at best to a few cities. What Lenin and the Communist Party recognised was that without large-scale electrification, neither industries nor agriculture would develop. Agriculture needed both irrigation and manufacturing to produce agricultural implements. This was why he said that the Soviets plus electrification was equal to socialism. For him and the Bolshevik party, that meant not just importing machines but also manufacturing them. The first target of industrialisation, therefore, was the electricity sector itself.
In November 1920, Lenin identified electricity as Russia’s path to communism: “Communism is equal to Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country”. The declaration signified the Communist Party’s approval of a plan forwarded by GOELRO, The State Commission for the Electrification of Russia, composed of engineers and scientists.
Lenin repeated his understanding of electricity and its importance to the Bolshevik Revolution in his address to the Third Congress of the Comintern (1921):
“A large-scale machine industry capable of reorganising agriculture is the only material basis that is possible for socialism… We had to undertake the scientific work of drawing up such a plan for the electrification of the USSR…with the cooperation of over two hundred of the best scientists, engineers and agronomists in Russia. Arrangements have now been made to convene an all-Russia congress of electrical engineers in August 1921 to examine this plan in detail, before it is given final government endorsement.”
A number of later bourgeois scholars, including post-modernists, have tried to present Lenin as a mechanistic materialist who sought to strait jacket science within a utilitarian framework of technology. What they fail to understand is that Lenin was proposing an alliance of the technical workers with the peasantry for the two-fold purpose of rapid industrialisation of Russia and expanding its agriculture.
The technical intelligentsia—engineers and scientists—also allied with the revolutionary forces through this programme of expanding the fledgeling electricity sector. It was not simply expanding electrification but also developing the ability to build the machines that would produce electricity: the hydro-turbines. This is what Marx called the Department 1 of the industry, the ability to build the machines themselves that produce other artefacts/goods. Hydroelectric power would supply electricity to the people and the industries, and the dams would provide water to irrigate the peasants’ fields. The alliance of the workers and peasants would be built around the hydroelectric projects themselves.
Lenin’s slogan of Soviets plus electricity was a political slogan as much as it was a techno-economic one. It became the backbone of the industrial development of the Soviet Union, as without electricity, no large-scale industrialisation would have been possible. It also built up a cadre of workers and technologists who would power the industrialisation of the Soviet Union.
Interestingly, the electricity sector in India was also the arena in which Nehruvian, the socialist-communist and the Ambedkarite vision also came together in post-Independence India. Just as Lenin had identified the electricity sector and hydroelectric projects as the core of the socialist project, so did Nehru and Ambedkar.
As we know, Nehru declared hydroelectric projects as the “temples” of modern India, though he also later thought of many small dams and small industrial projects as an alternative to a few large projects (When the big dams came up: The Hindu, March 20, 2015).
What is less known is Ambedkar and his pioneering efforts as the Chairman of the Policy Committee on Public Works and Electric Power in 1943, and drafting of India’s Electricity Act in 1948. He, as the architect of the Act, envisaged that electricity was an essential necessity, needed to be in the public sector and kept free of profit-making (Ambedkar’s Role in Economic Planning Water and Power Policy, Sukhdeo Thorat, Shipra Publications, 2006). He also defined himself as a socialist, though not a Marxist (India and Communism, B.R. Ambedkar, Introduction by Anand Teltumbde, Leftword Books).
Remembering Lenin, we not only have to remember his many-sided contributions to political action and building a revolutionary party but also his contribution to philosophy, including the philosophy of science.
His first major philosophy of science work was Materialism and Empirio-criticism, in which he criticises those who uncritically accepted the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Undoubtedly, quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity posed serious challenges to all philosophical schools. This is the nature of any major scientific advance. It not only challenges the knowledge of nature that we have, but also the philosophies of nature that we build on such an understanding of nature.
Just like the heliocentric world, the discovery of the quantum world and the relativistic nature of the world, shook up the philosophical world. Philosophers refused to accept Einstein’s theory of relativity, arguing that Einstein did not understand the philosophical nature of time, to which Einstein’s reply was he only understood the time that could be measured and not philosophical time.
This was reflected in a major debate between Einstein and Henri Bergson in Paris (The Physicist and the Philosopher, Jimena Canales, 2015). Though history would show that Einstein’s vision of time was objective, unlike subjective time for Bergson, Bergson’s view prevailed on the Nobel Committee, which gave Einstein the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect and not for relativity, for which he became world-famous, keeping in mind, “…that the famous philosopher Bergson in Paris has challenged this theory”.
Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, though not written as a book but as notes to himself, makes clear that he had moved beyond his earlier formulation of sense perception of the external world as a “reflection”. However, the critics of his Material and Empiro Criticism condemn it wrongly as being crude materialist based on this formulation alone. This is on par with condemning Engels as a crude materialist as opposed to Marx as the “correct” materialist.
Though Lenin always recognised that scientific laws are only partial and “fallible”, his understanding of motion itself as—being in two places simultaneously—as dialectical and cannot be captured by binary (yes/no) Aristotelian logic. This is enunciated clearly in the Notebook. Though many multi-valued logic formulations exist, an exposition of dialectical logic that can replace Aristotelian binary logic and yet retain the mathematics built on this structure of Aristotelian logic remains a challenge. In other words, Zeno’s paradox of why Achilles cannot catch a tortoise still remains a problem in the current paradigm of mathematical logic, even though we are fully aware that Achilles will overtake the tortoise!
We should be happy that Lenin has left us many more problems than what he has solved, both in revolutionary practice, history, economics and philosophy. This is our challenge, and a challenge all living science and philosophy should have. Others are dogmas that need to be discarded to understand the dynamics of nature and society.
Prabir Purkayastha
Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.
